Against Fundamentalism in Christian Bible Interpretation: The Biblical Case for Feminism and Gay Rights

What is astonishing about all the forms of American
fundamentalismnew natural law, Protestant fundamentalism, and Mormonismis that their hostility to
feminism and gay rights rests on a reading of ostensibly Christian texts that pays little or no attention to the life
and teaching of the historical Jesus.

By David A.J. Richards
Edwin D. Webb Professor of Law
New York University
October 2011

a. The Historical Jesus

Jesus takes a remarkable interest in women, as persons, and they take an interest in him. Women were not only
disciples,1 but they were
among the most faithful of his disciples, holding onto their relationship to Jesus in a way that men did not. The
interest of women in his teaching is portrayed as something that legitimately engages their intelligence as persons,
as Jesus defends Marys listening to his teaching from her sister Marthas distracted insistence that Jesus
patriarchally tells Martha to help her in the womanly tasks of serving, Luke 10:38-42. Jesus clearly teaches and
ministers to women in ways that speak to their subjective experience, including their experience of suffering as
women, even when traditional outcasts.2

The interpretive issue raised by Jesus attitude to women is the critical position to patriarchy that his
attitude suggests. Certainly, his defense of the woman taken in adultery calls for skepticism about one of the roots
of patriarchal violence, namely, violence against women who transgress patriarchal demands placed on their sexuality,
John 8:1-11.3 As one
careful student of the historical Jesus concludes, his teaching, at a minimum, entailed a certain reformation
of the patriarchal structure of society.4
If we take seriously, as contemporary feminist Bible scholars do, the degree to which Jesus critique of
patriarchy was diluted by the sexism of his later followers - who, ministering largely to highly patriarchal
Greco-Roman audiences of potential converts, chose as canonical texts and traditions those closer to the patriarchal
assumptions of their audiences - a reasonable case may be made that the historical Jesus critique of patriarchy
was probably much more profoundly radical.

Consider, from this perspective, Jesus teachings about non-violence: namely, the Sermon on the Mount, Matt. 5:7.
There are compelling reasons for believing that the historical Jesus could not have meant Matt. 5:36-42 to forbid the
role that the principle of self-defense plays in criminal law. Rather, Jesus is addressing the urge to resent a
wrong done to you as an affront to your pride, to forget that the wrongdoer is your brother before God and to compel
him to soothe your unworthy feelings; and it advocates, instead, a humility which cannot be wounded, a giving of
yourself to your brother which will achieve more than can be achieved by a narrow justice.5

What distinguishes Jesus commands not to resist one who is evil and turn the other
[cheek] is the way he grounds its motivations in an inclusive caring love that here asks men in particular to
question the force of the Mediterranean honor code in their lives, whose demands require that insults to manhood
unleash a cycle of violence. Such honor codes are framed in terms of patriarchal gender stereotypes, and the
violence is the way such stereotypes are enforced, for the violence is keyed to threats to honor defined by
patriarchy. Jesus, here as also in his defense from stoning of the woman taken in adultery, John 8:1-11, is asking
men to question the role such violence plays in their sense of manhood. Historically, Jesus stance is
remarkably anti-patriarchal.

Roman political authority was, of course, itself highly patriarchal, resting on a conception of patriarchal manhood
which made possible a military life and rule that legitimated aggressive war, imperial rule, and the enslavement of
defeated peoples on which the Roman imperium and economy depended.6
The Roman governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, exemplifies such patriarchal hierarchy and violence--a servile devotion
to his superiors, contempt for the people he ruled, cowardice, and cruelty.7
Jesus may have been as much critical of the patriarchal violence of Rome as he was or would have been of the forms of
it in Jewish culture, including those forms that would later develop into the violence of the Zealots in the First
Jewish Revolt (C.E. 66-70). The death of the historical Jesus thus exemplifies what may have been one of his
distinctive teachings: that the violence of patriarchal manhood in any of its forms requires the unjust repression of
free ethical voice.

b. Patriarchal Formation of Christian Tradition

What is astonishing about all the forms of American fundamentalismnew natural law, Protestant fundamentalism,
and Mormonismis that their hostility to feminism and gay rights rests on a reading of ostensibly Christian
texts that pays little or no attention to the life and teaching of the historical Jesus. Such fundamentalisms are
incoherent with what should, on internal biblical grounds, be the best evidence of the life and teaching of the
founder of Christianity, Jesus of Nazareth, namely, the four gospels, and for this reason deeply unreasonable.

To the extent fundamentalism claims biblical support, it primarily draws authority not from Jesus, but from other
texts of the New Testament, in particular, the letters of Paul.8
Christianity is a historical religion, and, of all the texts in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, some of the texts of
the New Testament are among the most historically reliable, as they were written much closer to the alleged
historical events than most biblical texts, certainly, most of the texts of the Hebrew Bible.9
Because the authentic Pauline letters we have are the earliest Christian texts we have (written before any of the
Gospels), they are among the most reliable, certainly, about the earliest views of Christian believers after the
death of Jesus. However, there are several historical difficulties with the appeal to Paul in interpreting Jesus
when there is clear interpretive conflict. First, several of the letters, including one on which fundamentalists
depend as the ground for their literalism, is not authentic.10
Second, Paul never knew Jesus personally, unlike the apostles and other followers, but he claimed to know him
problematically through visions. Third, in contrast to the apostles, who thought of Christianity as a sect within
traditional Judaism, Paul conceived his mission as one to Gentiles many of whom were not Jews, and came to regard
Christianity as not requiring traditional Jewish practices, including circumcision and observance of dietary laws.
With the destruction of Temple Judaism by the Romans and the murder and disruption of the Jewish Christians in
Jerusalem, Pauls mission to the Gentiles became Christianity, though a form of Christianity discontinuous with
its roots in the historical Jesus. Fourth, because of the character of Pauls mission and his audience, there
are good reasons for historical skepticism about the authority of his view of Christianity when his view contrasts
sharply with the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

The main reason for this skepticism is the anti-patriarchal character of the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth
and yet the hegemonic authority of patriarchal assumptions in the ancient Roman world, the world of the Gentiles that
Paul took as the audience for conversion to Christianity. The passages in the authentic Pauline letters, to which
fundamentalists appeal as authority for their views of gender and sexuality, reflect these assumptions, and must be
read skeptically for this reason, in particular, when they distort and even betray precisely the ethical impulses of
freedom and equality that are so distinctive of the anti-patriarchal life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth himself.
If anything, the problem of patriarchy, in the transmission of authentic Christianity, was very much heightened over
time, in particular, when Christianity becomes under Constantine and his successors the established church of the
Roman Empire, becoming more Roman than Christian.11

c. Dependence on Augustine

It is remarkable to contrast the historical Jesus with the form Christianity took after it became the established
church of the Roman Empire. I have discussed elsewhere at some length Augustines role in establishing, building
on Roman political and religious models, a male celibate priesthood that was highly patriarchal, religious authority
being placed in this priesthood that successfully appealed, as Augustine often did, to imperial authorities to
enforce its view of religious truth.12

Three forms of fundamentalist opposition to feminism and gay rights (new natural law in Roman Catholicism,
evangelical Christianity, and Mormonism) have become particularly important in American politics and law.13
Their interpretive approaches to Christianity could not be more different: new natural law appeals not to religious
texts as such, but to what it alleges to be the secular claims of a contemporary form of Thomism developed by the
theologian German Grisez; in contrast, evangelical Christianity claims to find its view in Biblical texts that it
supposes to be authoritative;14
and Mormonism appeals, in addition to Hebrew and Christian texts, to the various texts disclosed to its prophet,
Joseph Smith. Despite all these differences, all these forms of Christianity share a common political position on the
wrongness of the central claims of feminism and gay rights relating to the injustice of the subordination of women
and the rightness of contraception, abortion, and gay/lesbian sex, and have mobilized an American politics that has
elected conservative presidents and influenced appointments to the Supreme Court. All the contemporary
fundamentalisms under study here follow Augustine in limiting the priesthood to men, though two of them (evangelical
Protestantism and Mormonism) do not require priests to be celibate. It is their common patriarchal priesthood which
explains how and why three such different forms of Christianity should converge, as they do, on the reactionary
politics they do in the United Statesmobilizing coalitions based on hostility to feminism and gay/lesbian
rights, expressed in the polarization of American politics into red and blue states.

d.Feminism and Gay Rights and the Attack on Patriarchy

It was the American abolitionist feminists, many of them Quakers, who showed so reasonably that the teachings of
Jesus, which challenged dominant codes of patriarchal masculinity, supported a feminism which challenged the role the
gender binary had unjustly played in the enforcement of patriarchy.15
Much the clearest statement of this view is Sarah Grimkes Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the
Condition of Woman.16

Sarah Grimkes argument centered, first, on making her case that the dominant Biblical interpretations of
normatively influential texts of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament wrongly ascribed to them the moral ideology
of separate spheres and the inferiority of women, and, second, on showing how this had happened. The dominant
misogyny of Bible interpretation assumed, on examination, a wholly corrupt and illegitimate political epistemology
that unreasonably entrenched a patriarchal hierarchy of power and privilege over women (including a masculine
monopoly of Bible interpretation); this corrupt epistemology narrowed the terms of debate to the cramped measure of
masculine self-protection and for this illegitimate reason excluded women from reasonable participation in its
dialogue.

Grimkes substantive exercises in Bible interpretation applied a normative conviction that she took to be
central to the entire narrative and, thus understood, to be reasonably supported by the narrative, namely, that all
persons, made in the image of God, have the creative powers of a moral and responsible being.17
As such, each person was ultimately ethically responsible for ones self and accountable as such directly to God
and to no other person. In the light of this normative perspective, Grimkes substantive exercises in Bible
interpretation had two strategies: first, to show that the texts most commonly urged as supporting womens moral
inferiority did not reasonably require that reading; and second, to point to the often ignored texts that support
womens equality as creative moral agents. As regards the former, two texts were central: the Adam and Eve
narrative and the epistles of St. Paul.18

Grimkes reading of the Adam and Eve narrative argued that it cannot reasonably be interpreted to justify
womens inferiority as Gods punishment for the Fall. In fact, both Adam and Eve shared equal moral fault
in the Fall; certainly, Adams ready acquiescence with his wifes proposal, does not savor much of
that superiority in strength of mind,19
which is arrogated by man. Adam and Eve were punished by the loss of Paradise, but that punishment did not
change their natures of equally morally accountable agents. Properly understood, Gods statement, Thou
will be subject unto thy husband, and he will rule over thee,20
was a prophecy of mans corrupt subjection of women, not a normative command for such subjection. The contrary
view reflected the failure of male Bible interpreters to note the ambiguity of the pertinent Hebrew word for
will (between the normative shall and the predictive will), a failure Grimke
explained in terms of translators accustomed to exercise lordship over their wives, and seeing only
through the medium of a perverted judgment.21
Grimkes hermeneutic principle was that, among two readings of an ambiguous text, the one should be preferred
that better coheres with the basic normative purposes of the text as a wholein this case, the primary ethical
principle that all persons are equal moral agents.

Grimke appealed to this hermeneutic principle in repudiating the misogynist interpretation traditionally assigned to
various passages in Pauls epistles, for example, Wives submit yourselves unto your own husbands as unto
the Lord.22 For
Grimke, the traditional reading cannot be believed because it conflicted with the primary ethical principle of the
Bible, the equality of all persons: Now I must understand the sacred Scriptures as harmonizing with themselves,
or I cannot receive them as the word of God.23
Other reasonable readings were available that interpreted such passages without compromising this principle. Such
passages might, for example, be contextualized to a specific historical circumstance (converted Christian women
married to unconverted men) urging women in these circumstances patiently to bear the evil.24
This interpretation granted that husbands had no right to oppress women but insisted that the response to such evil
not appeal to what Grimke took to be un-Christian principles of violent resistance.

Grimkes affirmative interpretive relied heavily on the role of powerfully active female prophets in the Hebrew
Bible and the comparably important role played by women as preachers in early Christianity.25
Her central claim was that the dominant Christian tradition endorsing the subjection of women was illegitimate,
giving rise to an unreasonable genre of Bible interpretation that betrayed early Christianitys treatment of
women as the moral and spiritual equals of men, a view strikingly taken to similar effect today by, among others,
Elaine Pagels.26

The gender binary divides human abilities (splitting reason from emotion, mind from body, self from relationship). A
feminism, like Sarah Grimkes, that challenges the gender binary challenges the role the gender binary plays in
legitimating patriarchy, requiring a man not to be a woman and to be on top of the gender hierarchy in religion,
ethics, culture, and politics. It is a distinctive feature of this interpretation of feminism that it focuses on the
way the unjust form of the gender binary under patriarchy has disastrously injured men as well as women, dividing
both from their common humanity through a psychology of traumatic broken relationships that leads to patriarchal
violence between men and to such violence against women (both keyed to the codes of patriarchal honor Jesus condemned).
It is not surprising that it was this kind of feminism that rediscovered the anti-patriarchal features of the Gospels,
interpreting the Christianity of the Gospels as calling for a democratic equality of voice (including sexual voice) and
questioning the dominant patriarchal interpretation of Augustinian Christianity that rests on the repression of such equal
voice and thus rationalizes and supports the irrational prejudices that arise from the repression of voice (including
sexual voice)anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, and homophobia. It was a crucial feature of such feminism that
women, straight and gay, and gay men could as much be priests as men (the priesthood of all believers), and that such
equal moral and religious authority of voice was suppressed, not advanced, by the incoherence of a Protestant
fundamentalism that relegates the voices of women (straight and gay) and gay men to an abject, unspeakable
marginality.

These observations clarify why love between equals continues to be so threatening to many, precisely because it
observes how such love expresses itself to resistance to the ways in which patriarchy distorts and destroys the
responsive relationality of love. Because Christianity has been so uncritically read in the terms of Roman
patriarchy, many of those most threatened by such love are themselves Christians, fundamentalist Christians who read
patriarchy as nature.

What they fail to see is how the alternative anti-patriarchal reading of Christianity I propose clarifies what Jesus
thought were the difficulties for us of an ethics of love under patriarchy and why he expressed these difficulties
through the command to love even our enemies under the terms of a patriarchal culture that made such love
unspeakable, indeed unnatural. The familiar King James version translation of Matt. 5:48 is: Be ye therefore
perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect (Bible, Matt., 1998, 8). Jesus models our love for one
another (including loving even our enemies) on Gods love for us, as relationally responsive and responsible
persons and as equals. If so, the deepest impulses within Christianity call for a love only possible for us as
equals in responsible relationship, the basis for what is distinctive in contemporary feminism and gay/lesbian rights.

Notes

1
See John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus: Volume I: The Roots of the Problem and the
Person (New York: Doubleday, 1991), at pp. 73-80.

3
This passage may have been so threatening to the sexism of the early church that it was not accepted into the
canon until a more tolerant period. See, on this point, Raymond E. Brown, The Anchor Bible: The Gospel
According to John I-XII (New York: Doubleday, 1966), p. 335. This interpretive view, though controversial
among Bible scholars, is consistent with my general claim that patriarchy has distorted a reasonable
understanding of the Christian tradition, including of the historical Jesus.

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